[tcs-lc] Modularisation of standards

[Gregor Hagedorn]

Rich writes:

> The version I've been mulling about in my mind would look like this:
 
> <TaxonConcepts>
>   <TaxonConcept id="tc0" type="Nominal">
>     <Label>Aus bus</Label>
>     <CanonicalAuthorship>Black, 1965</CanonicalAuthorship>
>     [...and all the other LC bits]
>   </TaxonConcept>
>   <TaxonConcept id="tc1" Type="Original">
>     <NameRef id="tc0">
>     <NameVerbatim>Aus bus Black, 1965</NameVerbatim>
>     <AccordingTo>Black, 1965</AccordingTo>
>   </TaxonConcept>
>   <TaxonConcept id="tc2" Type="Revision">
>     <NameRef id="tc0">
>     <NameVerbatim>Aus bus Black</NameVerbatim>
>     <AccordingTo>Smith, 1970</AccordingTo>
>   </TaxonConcept>
>   <TaxonConcept id="tc3" Type="Revision">
>     <NameRef id="tc0">
>     <NameVerbatim>Aus bea Blk., 1965</NameVerbatim>
>     <AccordingTo>Jones, 1975</AccordingTo>
>   </TaxonConcept>
> </TaxonConcepts>

I have no problems with this. However, the example makes probably an implicit 
assumption that content (which elements occur inside TaxonConcept) can depend 
on the value of the Type attribute. This is not supported in xml schema.

As the example shows, records of type="Nominal" would have different content 
than those of other types, which can not be validated in w3c xml schema. This 
is a known limitation.

Note that it is possible to rename 

   <TaxonConcept id="tc0" type="Nominal">
to
   <NominalConcept id="tc0">

and still have a single collection, if this should be socially desirable. A 
collection of elements may be a repeated choice, yielding any sequence such as:

TaxonConcept
NominalConcept
NominalConcept
TaxonConcept
NominalConcept
TaxonConcept

> The downside is that it *requires* the inclusion of a corresponding
> "Nominal" concept for every different name used among the set of non-Nominal
> TaxonConcept instances provided in a Dataset package.  If a package contained a
> 1:1 relationship between Concepts and names, then there wouldn't be any
> substantial reduction of overall package size (infact, a slight increase in
> package size).  

I still view this as and ADVANTAGE, because it encourages (or requires) data 
structures that support name-object based machine reasoning in the majority of 
cases where no concept relationship assertions are known. Let us not dream a 
perfect world, where these relationships would auto-magically appear, or where 
we find the money to hire twice the current amount of people working in 
taxonomy to do the job...

Gregor----------------------------------------------------------
Gregor Hagedorn (G.Hagedorn at bba.de)
Institute for Plant Virology, Microbiology, and Biosafety
Federal Research Center for Agriculture and Forestry (BBA)
Königin-Luise-Str. 19           Tel: +49-30-8304-2220
14195 Berlin, Germany           Fax: +49-30-8304-2203